Marion Cotillard Slated to Play Lady Macbeth

Marion Cotillard, slated to play Lady Macbeth

Years ago I had Lady Macbeth standing under the same umbrella as Iago and Richard III:  that being of the quintessential evil in Shakespeare.  But over time I've come to appreciate the complexity of, and the despair in, her character, and consequently found myself gradually more sympathetic.  That she emasculates Macbeth to pieces, while he is rightfully questioning their plan to kill King Duncan, is horrible.  But that she is a painfully troubled woman, merely trying to come to grips with herself, engenders that sympathy.

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances 50
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'

Reference:  Act I, scene v

Let's see how Marion Cotillard brings to bear her smoldering good looks to the vampish Lady Macbeth.